John Lam’s big, soft Melancholic balances muscle with meditation, and he’s not fazed when the quartet of psychopomp ladies turn up, their scything grands battements like the heartbeats of the universe. All jutting hips and flicking legs, Erica Cornejo makes Sanguinic look almost too easy, but that’s in the character. Her partner, Nelson Madrigal, seems heavy by comparison, though last night his entrechat six were well defined. A second quartet of ladies, meanwhile, hot-foot it across the stage, as if they’d somehow all wound up in Hell rather than Heaven, and though Cornejo dances with them briefly, the couple and the quartet go their separate ways. Carlos Molina’s droopy, centrifugal Phlegmatic just wants to get along, so of course his female quartet keep getting in the way, waggling their pelvises (this seemed understated last night), offering and not offering, while he tries to protect his space. Once Hindemith’s music lopes into its third part, however, man and women reach an accord. That breaks down at once with Breen Combes’s feral entrance in Choleric. This time it’s a quartet of men surrounding the woman, hunters, or the bachelors from Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass — but it turns out Breen Combes has reinforcements. As the themes — musical and choreographic — and the dancers from the previous sections return, harmony — musical and sexual — breaks out.

Apollo is also a theme and variations and a battle of the sexes — so maybe that’s the story in this program. Apollo himself is the theme — even without the prologue in which we see him born (Balanchine dropped it in 1979), you know you’re watching his existential birth, his artistic birth, his romantic birth. In that signature moment when he opens and closes his right fist, he’s the center of the universe — or it’s the center of him. And when he dances with his three half-sisters (all of them children of Zeus) in close-order drill, Balanchine is anticipating the daisy chains of ballets yet to be born (notably Theme and Variations), the perfection of the individual within the perfection of the group. Pavel Gurevich is an expansive and wide-eyed god-in-the-making; Rie Ichikawa is an overdramatic, redundant Calliope (but then, that’s why Apollo passes on her), Whitney Jensen a leggy, exuberant Polyhymnia. Lia Cirio’s Terpsichore is hard to fault: she does everything right, but she looks as if she were trying to do everything right instead of just doing it.

Balanchine changed the ending of Apollo as well as the beginning: instead of climbing a staircase to Parnassus, leaving the Muses in his wake (is this a metaphor for the choreographer and his ballerina Muses?), the god stands with an arm stretched outward and the three ladies fan out behind him in different stages of arabesque. It doesn’t match the stark farewell of Stravinsky’s score, which departs without having answered its four-note riddle. The loss of Stravinsky’s prologue, too, is crippling to the structure of the music. Boston Ballet did the pre-1979 version in 1993; I was sorry not to see it this time out.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

Local flavor Local journalist and acclaimed hip-hop scribe Andrew Martin has corralled a flavorful roster of Rhody-based rap talent on the Ocean State Sampler , 10 exclusive tracks available for free download.

Good and evil From L. Frank Baum's 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came the 1939 film; from Gregory Maguire's 1995 book Wicked came the 2003 Broadway hit of the same name.

Beyond Dilla and Dipset With a semi-sober face I'll claim that hip-hop in 2010 might deliver more than just posthumous Dilla discs, Dipset mixtapes, and a new ignoramus coke rapper whom critics pretend rhymes in triple-entendres.

John Harbison plus 10 Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.

Fresh fruit and vegetables The bleakest months of New England winter are ahead of us, so the prospect of leaving your toasty house to see art may not be at the top of your to-do list.

LIGHT WAVES: BOSTON BALLET'S ''ALL KYLIÁN'' | March 13, 2013 A dead tree hanging upside down overhead, with a spotlight slowly circling it. A piano on stilts on one side of the stage, an ice sculpture's worth of bubble wrap on the other.

HANDEL AND HAYDN'S PURCELL | February 04, 2013 Set, rather confusingly, in Mexico and Peru, the 1695 semi-opera The Indian Queen is as contorted in its plot as any real opera.

REVIEW: MAHLER ON THE COUCH | November 27, 2012 Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.